"Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand--that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us."
~ Annie Dillard, "An Expedition to the Pole"

15 March 2005

Resonant thoughts

[...] I am stranded in the office without being able to write anything for the book. What to do instead? write about what you cannot write, so at least you have some relationship to what needs to be done, even if it is only at one remove. Vicarious writing, writing by proxy: this is what blogging permits, as letter-writing used to do.

Once upon a time, I would have used this interval to have written to a friend. Such a writing seems very far away now. Remember the joy of criss-crossing letters: one sent to X and another received from X and so on, each with the two to three day wait which detached what was written from what was experienced in the moment of writing. But this is already naive, as if writing did not always demand such a detachment: as if to write and to write a letter was already to have lost what was experienced and to have regained it in a new way, as words on the page.

Now, instead, words on a screen. But this is happiness: the sense something was done, that I will have made something from these vacant minutes.

“There are those who maintain that you can't demand anything of the reader. They say the reader knows nothing about art, and that if you are going to reach him, you have to be humble enough to descend to his level. This supposes that the aim of art is to teach, which it is not, or that to create anything which is simply a good-in-itself is a waste of time. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it. We hear a great deal about humility being required to lower oneself, but it requires an equal humility and a real love of the truth to raise oneself and by hard labor to acquire higher standards.” ~ Flannery O'Connor